Iomega Pocket Zip drive

PocketZip PCMCIA drive with 40mb disk and carrying case.

The PocketZip drive was a drive made by Iomega in 1999 that used proprietary, small, very thin, floppy-like 40MB disks. It had no relation to the Zip drive. It was known as the "Clik!" drive until the click of death class action lawsuit regarding mass failures of Iomega's Zip drives. Thenceforth, it was renamed to PocketZip. A 100 MB Pocket Zip drive version had been in the works, was intended to be backwards compatible with the 40 MB disks, but ended up being vaporware and PocketZip itself would be discontinued as well.

PocketZip drive and media

The PocketZip drive was available originally as a laptop PC card (PCMCIA) slot drive where it could compete with contemporary PC card, MicroDrive, CompactFlash and SmartMedia readers. A "dock" was available to connect this drive to a desktop computer's parallel port. Later, a USB version of the drive was also offered. It was marketed as a backup and portable storage solution, similar to the Zip drive, but which could be installed completely inside of a laptop, as PC cards typically slide completely inside of the laptop and thus do not increase its dimensions, which also precludes the need for a power supply or cables.

The PocketZip media was a small, partly circular flexible disk inside of a thin metal casing, similar to that found on the shutter of a floppy disk. The disks usually came in small format-specific plastic cases, and the drive also shipped for a while with a small hard metal case which could house the drive and two disks. The disks could be bent easily if too much force was applied, thereby completely damaging them.

A similar device, Digital Capture Technology (DCT), with smaller disks and storage of 1.5 GB was rumored to be in the works in the early 2000s.

Use in consumer electronics

The format was also used in a small number of consumer electronics, including the Iomega HipZip Digital Audio Player, the Sensory Science Rave MP 2300, and the Agfa ePhoto CL30 Clik. The format saw use in other devices as well but proved to be a commercial failure. It suffered heavy competition from flash memory based memory cards. The PocketZip was electro-mechanical and, hence, was not as reliable as solid-state flash memory cards which have no moving parts; also, as the capacity and speed of flash memory storage increased and its costs decreased, the PocketZip lost viability as a portable storage solution.

Specifications

(from Iomega support site):

• Capacity: 40 MByte
• Seek Time: 38 ms
• Sustained transfer rate: Up to 600 kByte/s
• Rotational speed: 2941 RPM
• Short format time: 10 seconds
• Long format time: 5 minutes
• Average start/stop time: 3 seconds
• Disk shelf life: 10 years

Operating system support

According to the original documentation, Pocket Zip USB and PC Card work with Windows 95, Windows 98/98SE and Windows NT 4.0. Iomega provided USB mass storage support for Windows 95 with at least OSR2 (4.00.950B) for use with its Zip products. Under Windows NT 4, Pocket Zip PC Card only works with certain PC Card controllers (which ones are not named by Iomega). Pocket Zip USB also works with Mac OS 8.x, but the PC card version is specified as not working with Apple computers.

In practice, the USB drive is a standard mass storage device, so it will also work on any modern operating system which can use such devices, including Windows XP, Vista and 7, Mac OS X and Linux. The PC card drive, similarly, is a standard removable ATA device, so it also will typically function without any problems on modern operating systems including Windows XP. The problem on the latest operating systems is unavailability or incompatibility of the software used to operate the proprietary features of the drive, such as low-level formatting and the software write protection.

Devices that use the PocketZip format

• PocketZip PC Card Drive
• PocketZip USB Drive
• HipZip Digital Audio Player (Iomega-branded MP3 player)
• Sensory Science Rave MP 2300 (MP3 player with voice recording and minimal PIM viewer functionality)
• Agfa ePhoto CL30 Clik! (Digital camera which uses PocketZip media for storage)

External links

• Iomega Press Release about 100MB PocketZip
• Windows NT 4.0 support info (Microsoft article ID 195540)